Friday, July 31, 2009

"Arianna" Must Be The Greek Word For Stupid

"[Arianna Huffington's] desire to be different became,...clear when I looked at her views about health. In her 2006 self-help book, 'On Being Fearless,' she provides her own definition of preventive care, one that's indistinguishable from Evans' blog post. 'In today's world, where thousands of chemicals are being used all around us, it's essential both to protect against exposure and to maintain some kind of detox program,' Huffington wrote. In the New Yorker, Collins revealed that Huffington has undergone 'mercury detoxification, fire-walking, est, microdermabrasion, infrared saunas' and a long list of fad diets. In 'On Being Fearless,' she gave a description of her own experience with mercury detox, saying she was 'stunned to find how much mercury I had in my body.'

What Huffington may not know is the test used to determine the amount of mercury in the body is a sham, as proven by medical researchers at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Emory University and other public health institutes. The test artificially elevates the levels of heavy metals in one's body, falsely leading one to believe that they've been poisoned by toxins. In fact, a doctor who routinely prescribed the test has been investigated and disciplined.

In an e-mail to me, Huffington touched on her long and winding road through alternative therapies, dropping the names of major universities (Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, UCLA) with centers for complementary and alternative medicine, where she has been a patient. But health coverage on the site goes beyond complementary medicine. In fact, the more I read the site, the more I realized its health writers were being chosen not in the name of diversity or on the basis of their qualifications. Rather, as Collins revealed in the New Yorker, they appear to be picked by Huffington on a whim."

-- Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., on the piss-poor NewAge medical advice you can find on The Huffington Post - which is the same nutty nonsense he found coming from Oprah Winfrey - which isn't a surprise, except all of this looniness is being covered so well by Salon.